becoming the fool
Thu, 25 Sep 2025
| last modified Mon, 27 Oct 2025
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I love programming because it reminds me that I’m the fool.
The butt of the joke. The one out of the loop.
It’s strange really, the embarrassment I can feel at my silly mistakes when coding. There isn’t any social pressure. No one else is watching. But that’s the heart of it. Coding wonderfully exposes my own impatience and arrogance when, at the end of every error, lies the same culprit: yours truly.
It causes some really sober moments of reflection about how quickly I complexify issues, begin to suspect others (in the form of libraries, hardware and the like), and delay in finding myself at fault until the final moment. Ok maybe that last one is a bit of an exaggeration - I’ve come to know that I’m usually the one at fault, but still find it easy to doubt that when I’m stuck for a while.
Some people say that golf is the most humbling sport, but I think that programming in a language you only half understand takes the cake for me.
The most humorous cases are when I’ve solved non-existent problems and have to bin my work. They train a kind of resilience where you learn to throw away (sometimes) hours of work for a much simpler and better solution. Oftentimes, just a little checking of documentation - or more honestly a ChatGPT prompt - and I would have found a built-in feature instead of doing it myself.
The most recent example has been the color themes I’ve set up on this site. I swap out two css variables for the primary and secondary accents, which then style the whole page (like how home is rose and blogs here are cyan). I wrote a little script which does this quite neatly and did the plumbing to call it on load for each page, and made sure that my hugo links the generated blog pages to the right scripts and such, all to discover that, to my horror, there is a css feature where you can toggle a section of css with an html property. To make matters worse the js calls after the first style, so the colours flicker to the default first!
Hopefully, all of this madness refines my character or something.
Anyways, back to fools.
For a while, I’ve found the archetype of the wise fool really interesting. It’s a horrible affront to intellectual pride and I just find the ideas viscerally compelling:
- for all our learning, it seems the fool was right after all
- oh look, I guess sometimes you just stumble into the right answer
- the fool in his folly speaks the truth without fear
- he who we despised was the greatest of us all
I especially like the Judeo-Christian paradox of wisdom: only the foolish consider themselves wise. Alternatively, only the wise consider themselves foolish.
It also plays wonderfully into the realities of humour. Often the best humour comes from someone playing the fool: not considering themselves too high and mighty to be the butt of a joke.
Anyways, this is quite a scattering of thoughts on the topic of fools, but I will leave you with the gorgeously haunting visage of Stańczyk as he ponders the capture of Smolensk.
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